MTA Officials Talk Safety at First Meeting After Metro-North Derailment

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has launched a period of “soul-searching” in the wake of a fatal train derailment that killed four riders in the Bronx earlier this month, executives said Monday, the first day of public meetings since the crash.

REUTERS

Emergency workers examine the site of a Metro-North train derailment in the Bronx on Dec. 1.

The MTA’s two commuter railroads are analyzing dangerous areas of track, finalizing plans to improve safety systems in train cabs, and preparing for a 60-day intense examination by federal regulators to begin Monday of Metro-North Railroad, where the derailment and crash occurred Dec. 1.

The MTA and railroad leadership do not contest that some safety changes — especially installation of a failsafe in the existing signal system near the curve where the crash occurred — could have been installed before the accident.

As in the case of previous accidents, like a fatal subway derailment in 1991, MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast said the agency is grappling with its response to a problem that had simply never occurred before. Similar to the subway accident, millions of trains had negotiated the curve at Spuyten Duyvil where this month’s crash happened, without an accident of this type.

“It’s been taken very hard within the Metro-North family,” the railroad’s president, Howard Permut, said. “We understand the enormity of all of this.”

“We will do everything we can going forward to operate the railroad in absolutely the safest way we can,” he added.

No major new safety initiatives were announced on Monday. Metro-North has already installed a new circuit on its signal system, at an interlocking north of the Spuyten Duyvil curve, that will trigger brakes on a train if it is speeding in the approach to the curve. No formal cause has been identified, but federal investigators said they are leaning toward operator error in the cause of the crash. The train was traveling 82 miles an hour in the curving stretch of track, where speed limits drop to 30 mph, the National Transportation Safety Board said.

Metro-North’s signal system did not have any areas of civil speed protection prior to the accident — that is, areas where the system is designed to automatically trigger a train’s brakes because of a sharp turn in the tracks. Similar protections will be installed at four other sharp curves and at five movable bridges on the railroad in the coming year, executives said.

Long Island Rail Road President Helena Williams said that railroad has such safety circuits at nine sharp curves on its territory, and is now planning to add them at seven more.

The authority is in the throes that usually follow a rare but highly damaging railroad accident, said Norman Brown, a board member, quoting a version of an old railroad adage: “Regulations are written in blood.”

Mr. Prendergast recalled previous crises, including the 1991 14th Street derailment, a fatal fire at the Clark Street station in Brooklyn in 1990, and a more recent scandal in which subway workers were caught falsifying safety inspection records.

After the latter incident, Mr. Prendergast said, he and other managers grilled those responsible for the inspections, which are in part designed to catch failures of the signal system that can prevent train collisions.

“They’d ask us the question: ‘What do you want, safety, productivity or on-time performance,’” Mr. Prendergast said. “We said, ‘You’ve got it wrong. You need to get all three. But if you can only have one, it has to be safety.’”

The MTA and Mr. Prendergast have committed to installing expensive new overlays of its signal systems on both Metro-North and the LIRR. The systems, called positive train control, or PTC, are federally mandated to be in place by the end of 2015, but the MTA, like major commuter rail operators across the country, has said it cannot meet that deadline. The MTA last week asked for a $1 billion federal loan to speed the deployment of PTC.

Some board members said existing technology to provide redundancy should be installed more widely.

“You can’t just rely on the engineer,” board member Ira Greenberg said.

“It’s actually a two-way street,” Mr. Prendergast replied.

The MTA has begun adding alerters that can detect lack of activity in train cabs, a system that might also have assisted in halting the train on Dec. 1, officials said.

But Mr. Prendergast also warned that such backup systems can lead to a “Pavlovian response” from engineers — the driver responding to the stimulus of alarms rather than focusing on the territory ahead of him.